Iraqi people would be better off with Saddam

Source : Voice of Russia

The prominent journalist Andrew Gilligan resigned from the BBC after reporting that Britain went into Iraq based on exagerrated claims about Saddam Hussain's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Writing in the Daily Telegraph this week he says that the war in Iraq has been a huge blow to the moral and international standing of the UK.

“I think essentially the problem with the occupation was that it was never properly resourced, it was never done with adequate numbers of troops and that is why the vast majority of people – perhaps 90% of the victims of the war – died. And the failure to do it properly was the direct consequence of the lies and evasions that were justified, in the first place, because people were disgusted at those, and nobody wants to get politically behind the occupation.”

But you've also, in recent columns, described Iraq as a humiliation for the British military.

“Yes, I mean, essentially the British military were defeated in Iraq, they essentially surrendered in Basra, in their part of Southern Iraq, and had to be rescued by the Iraqi and Americans armies. That's not very widely realized, but it is true. Because we were never willing to commit sufficient resources to the occupation, we ended up having to do what was effectively a surrender deal with the Mahdi Army, with the Iranian-backed militia that were present in Baghdad. And essentially we agreed with them that we would no longer enter the city of Basra in return for them stopping attacking us. And that's certainly kept the body countdown, which is obviously the main wish in London. But it also handed Basra to the Mahdi Army.”

You've also made the allegation that, in fact, that less than sterling performance by the British military that you described also damaged Britain's relations with the U.S.

“There's no doubt about that and there's quite substantial evidence for it and classified documents that I was leaked in 2009. They're basically transcripts of interviews which were done by the army itself with its commanders of the operation afterward and those commanders themselves the Americans treated them with contempt really. They didn't even talk to them. They didn't even have a secure U.S. commander, overall Commander General Rick Sanchez didn't even install a secure phone line, so he could talk with his British counterparts, so unimportant were them to him. And the fact is that the British came with it with a kind of smug census superiority. They knew how to do counter insurgency. And they knew how to talk to the native, unlike those brutal and clumsy Americans. The Americans were brutal and clumsy - horribly brutal and clumsy, to begin with, but they did learn and they did change and unlike us they didn't give up and they did surge resources and in the end helped in part, at least by the overreach of their enemies, helped in part by the overreach of al-Qaeda in Iraq which alienated the people it was trying to enlist. The U.S. eventually prevailed, sort of. Obviously Iraq is no picnic.”

There're people like yourself who had been critical of British involvement, and of course legions of people have been critical of Britain's willingness to go into Iraq in the first place and that is a sword still hanging over former Prime Minister Blair indeed. But everyone will then turn around and say, "But we did get rid of Saddam Hussein.” Was that not the objective? And was it not a positive accomplishment?

“There's absolutely no doubt that Iraq would be better off, had Saddam Hussein remained in power. 200,000 Iraqis would not be dead. Obviously there was a cost for him remaining in power, continued sanctions did kill quite a lot of Iraqis. But nothing like as many has died in the war.”

Would the Kurds support that view?

“The Kurds have their liberation already. They were free of Saddam and had been from 1991. They had an effectively autonomous state in the North. The fact is that Saddam didn’t threat anyone, except for his own people, and even the threat to his own people had diminished dramatically since the previous Gulf War. And the British government and the American government knew that and that was indeed precisely why they thought precisely that it'd be an easy victory, they didn’t estimate how difficult it would be.”

But given the violent opposition to Britain going into that war from the British public and indeed many sections of the British political establishment and given the damage it did to Tony Blair's reputation, what in the nutshell was the reason we did it?

“Well, I think, Tony Blaire thought it would be like Kosovo, he thought that there would be huge outcry from the British liberal class and there would be predictions of refugee columns and disasters and that kind of thing, but in the end it would go well, that casualties would be light, that the Iraqi regime would crumble without much of a fight and that the occupation forces would be welcomed. And he was wrong about all those things.”